On occasion, I look up at the tagline of this blog (“Prescriptivism Must Die”) and wonder if perhaps I’m being too harsh. But then I read something like Robert Hartwell Fiske’s Dictionary of Disagreeable English, and realize that the tagline is, if anything, understating the case.

Fiske seems to believe he is in some sort of competition for the title of King Prescriptivist, and his book seems to be his equivalent of the Eveningwear Competition. His book flaunts everything that is wrong with prescriptivism: ad hominem attacks, unresearched prescriptions, illogic, wild invective against those who disagree with him. You might remember his quote that the to no end idiom, which many of you well-educated readers use, is a “bastardization born of mishearing”, when — of course — he presented no evidence for this claim.

In his books, Fiske is a bully who asserts that disagreeing with him or making a simple usage error is evidence of poor mental faculties. As it is with anyone who argues by bluster and bluff, proving Fiske wrong is an exercise in futility. It’s like nailing jelly to the wall; you can do it, sure, but he’s just going to ignore the nail of evidence and continue his descent to the floor of absurdity. It is a complete and utter waste of time. That said, I haven’t much of a stomach for bullies, and have some time to waste.

Let’s start with an example of a bald assertion made without any effort made to back it up. Check out this weaselly use of the passive: “Though both words are in common use, normality is considered preferable to normalcy.” Who considers normality preferable, exactly? Certainly not The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (which, by the way, is being sold through Fiske’s website), in which it is written that “Normalcy and normality stand side by side in AmE [American English] as legitimate alternatives.” This sort of unsourced claim is exactly why everyone’s always up in arms about the passive voice. This is “mistakes were made” territory.

Most of the book consists of these unjustified ipse dixit proclamations. I can see why; when Fiske does offer justifications, he often contradicts himself. Here’s a line from page 284: “Preventive is preferable to preventative because it has one fewer syllable.” Hey, look, I’m fine with that. Speaking as a light dyslexic, I am all too willing to accept shorter words; there’s less for me to transpose. But a mere 12 pages earlier in the book, Fiske talks about perquisite, which he sneers is “commonly called a perk by the ever-monosyllabic, ever-hasty everyman”. So is conciseness the sign of an efficient mind or a hasty mind? We are left to wonder.

And then he does the same thing again when talking about one of the only: “Only does not mean two or more; it means one, sole, alone. One of the only then is altogether nonsensical—and further evidence that people scarcely know what their words mean.” This is quite incorrect, and there are so many ways to show it — in fact, I did so in a previous post. One could cite the 20-odd pre-1800 usages of the phrase “one of the only” in Google Books, or perhaps the 634 pre-1800 usages of the phrase “the only two“, which surely would be ruled out if only could not possibly refer to two or more objects. One could even go back a bit farther and point out the Oxford English Dictionary’s citation of a plural usage of only in Pecock’s Repressor, printed around 1450. Yes, yes, all of these would be well and good, and would serve to illustrate that there is no historical injunction against only modifying a plural noun. But the particular usages I choose to cite in defense of one of the only are a bit more modern:

(1) “We have words aplenty that mean to annoy; the only other words that mean to aggravate are worsen and exacerbate.”
(2) “[…] the only people inclined to use & in place of and […]” [Italics author’s, boldface mine.]

These usages are from pages 30 and 43 of The Dictionary of Disagreeable English, by Robert Hartwell Fiske. Clearly, Fiske himself scarcely knows what only means, since his stated definition doesn’t match his observed usage of plural only. So if (1) and (2) are fine, why would Fiske object to saying that “worsen is one of the only words that mean to aggravate,” or that “the new copywriter is one of the only people inclined to use &”? It’s beyond me.

All right, enough of that. So Fiske occasionally contradicts himself. Who doesn’t? So Fiske sometimes doesn’t support his beliefs. Is it fair to excoriate someone for that? In most cases I’d say no. But Fiske is a bully, one who launches vicious ad hominem attacks against the intelligence of other writers. For instance, when Burt Sugar, a boxing writer for the Los Angeles Times decided to get a bit cute, writing of an out-of-shape boxer that he “has gone north–as in north of 250 pounds,” Fiske responded that “Mr. Sugar, like some of the boxers he writes about, has apparently had his ear deformed, his brains addled.” After all, he’s used north of, which Fiske describes as “[i]diotic for more than.” Never mind that I found this usage to actually be rather clever, with its implication that the boxer had metaphorically gone on vacation. Fiske clearly did not, and that makes Sugar an idiot.

Another example: Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, is apparently a fool. After all, he used the wrong tense in this sentence: “If I would have been a publishing house, I would’ve eagerly taken David’s book.” Yeah, it’s not right, but it doesn’t reveal any glaring intellectual deficit, right? Wrong! Fiske writes “Mr. Lowry’s use of would have exposes an inability to reason well—as does his imagining he might conceivably have been a publishing house.” Yep, I’m sure that Lowry was really imagining that.

So if I may be excused for the well-worn phrase, Fiske is really a pot calling a kettle black. If these writers have addled brains and an inability to reason, then one can scarcely imagine what Fiske has.

One last point, and perhaps the most frustrating one, is that on rare occasions Fiske shows admirable lucidity. For instance, he admonishes one questioner that “[p]erhaps you have trouble understanding why fixing to is improper because—dislike it though you may—it is not improper; it is, as you say, Southern.” Oh, if only that reasonable Robert Hartwell Fiske could sit down and talk to the Fiske who spazzes over Sugar’s north of, or the one who baldly asserts that normalcy is to be avoided. Maybe then we would have been spared Fiske’s disagreeable complaints. But instead, we are treated to the vitriol of a crank who views any error, whether large or small, as incontrovertible evidence of the end of English.

About The Blog

A lot of people make claims about what "good English" is. Much of what they say is flim-flam, and this blog aims to set the record straight. Its goal is to explain the motivations behind the real grammar of English and to debunk ill-founded claims about what is grammatical and what isn't. Somehow, this was enough to garner a favorable mention in the Wall Street Journal.

About Me

I'm Gabe Doyle, currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University. Before that, I got a doctorate in linguistics from UC San Diego and a bachelor's in math from Princeton.

In my research, I look at how humans manage one of their greatest learning achievements: the acquisition of language. I build computational models of how people can learn language with cognitively-general processes and as few presuppositions as possible. Currently, I'm working on models for acquiring phonology and other constraint-based aspects of cognition.

I also examine how we can use large electronic resources, such as Twitter, to learn about how we speak to each other. Some of my recent work uses Twitter to map dialect regions in the United States.

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23 comments

I remember the time Robert Hartwell Fiske was railing against the use of ‘duck tape’ for ‘duct tape’. Never mind that the jury is still out on the question of which was the original. One of his examples of idiotic misuse was a joke involving the tape, a farmer, and one or more ducks. The joke would not have been a joke if it were required to be about duct tape.

You make some interesting and perhaps valid points here, Gabe, but in the weaker moments of this post you are I think falling into exactly the faults you accuse Fiske of: rhetorical overkill and ad hominem argument. Notice that your title isn’t raising a rational disagreement with Fiske; it’s calling him names.

I have been contributing essays and columns to Fiske’s online journal, The Vocabula Review, for four or five years now, and during that time Robert has been, as an editor, simply a joy to work with: prompt, candid, honest, helpful, severe when he needs to be, encouraging, open-minded (the adjective on this list that will surprise you most, I suspect), and dependable. How is it that you have found such an utterly different Robert Fiske in his Dictionary of Disagreeable English? A big part of the reason I think is that arguments over usage have an amazing tendency to turn rude and violent and bring out the worst in all of us. You say tomayto, I say tomahto — and next thing you know, we both have our knives at each other’s throats, for reasons we hardly begin to understand.

We all have a tendency to rant when we try to lobby for our own linguistic hobbyhorses. Robert has, no doubt, ranted a bit in his Dictionary (a section subtitle in an anthology he has edited is “Rants, Outbursts, and Oddities” — cheerfully admitting these as regularly – occurring GENRES in the world of language commentary). But you are ranting right back without seeming to know it. Specifically, you take a HUGE logical leap when you proceed from A) disagreeing with him about several particular prescriptions, tiny tiny points if you stop to think about them; to B) denouncing him as a person; much less C) declaring that, because he has (you say) made some wrong judgments, “Prescriptivism must die”!

I don’t doubt that you mean something, in that slogan, more reasonable than what I hear. What I do hear, though, is something little short of nonsense, as if you were saying “Gravity must cease!” Arguing about usage is one of the great and inescapable human activities, and an entirely necessary one because language is a social property in need of constant tending and re-negotiation. To be fiercely protective of one’s own idiolect, at the unconscious level at least, is so nearly the same thing as having language at all that I really can’t imagine the one thing existing without the other. Deep down we are all grammar Nazis simply because we have to be, because there is no other way to keep the incredibly complex machine of language humming along as it does. Of course, we can’t all have our own way with language, so in any social unit larger than the tribe, Rhetoric springs up as a more or less visible institution, comprising everything from English classes to book reviews to language tapes to dictionaries to published grammars to websites and books like Robert’s, all more or less devoted to the question not just of what language IS but of what it OUGHT to be — and to the endless practical quest to use language as effectively as possible.

I know you can’t possibly mean that you want all this enormous activity and never-ending conversation to cease. But I have trouble understanding what else you could mean by declaring that “Prescriptivism must die!” I have enormous respect for Linguistics on its own ground; but the quarrel linguists sometimes want to pick with traditional rhetoric is pointless and wrong-headed. They are two quite different ways of knowing and viewing language, and to exclude either would make us much poorer, not richer (not that excluding Rhetoric is even an imaginable possibility anyway). Linguists are quite right — profoundly right — in insisting that, for their purposes, no language is “better” than any other, nor even any dialect superior to others within a language. But the fact that speakers themselves are constantly making normative judgments, not just in conscious reflection upon language but in the most basic activity of forming and decoding untterances — this is part of the basic data the linguist should be acknowledging and studying, not denying and proscribing in what amounts to a renunciation of the empirical method.

What I’m saying, I guess, is that description and prescription are yin and yang, and that it’s pointless to try to dispense with either.

Sorry to go on so long. But once I saw what seem to me very unfair judgments of Robert Fiske, I had to say jump in.

However, it does offer evidence for the suspicion that one appeal of prescriptivism is a kind of sentimental conservatism — the desire to feel as though one is preserving tradition. Your note cloaks all specific examples (e.g. disdaining “one of the only”) under the rubric of “traditional rhetoric”, which I submit is essentially unrelated.

John, you say that any social unit larger than a tribe automatically has language classes, dictionaries, grammar books, etc. But this isn’t true: English survived until the 18th century without grammar teachers and grammar books. I’m sure that people have always have been commenting on language use, for as long as language has been around. But correct grammar and usage, as an English institution, is relatively new.

@John Kilgore: Is the title of this post ad hominem? Of course. But an ad hominem argument? I don’t think so. My application of insulting terms to Fiske is strictly my interpretation of his argument style. I am not saying that his argument is wrong because he seems like a prig and bully; I am saying that his argument is bad for independent reasons, and his argument style is makes him seem like a prig and a bully. You’ll note that I do not (in my opinion) attack Fiske the man, but rather Fiske the writer. Fiske the man may well be personable, reasonable, and even open-minded, but he does a poor job of showcasing those traits in his book. Fiske the writer is definitely an ill-tempered grouch, obsessed with meaningless distinctions. If you look at the book, for instance the Introduction, I think you’ll see why I find Fiske the writer so different from your impression of Fiske the man.

I certainly agree that I am ranting in this post, for the simple reason that I get very irritated when someone goes around saying obviously wrong things, insulting people, and demanding that they agree with him. And I get especially irritated when that person can’t be bothered to check his opinions against his own usage, as in the only two debate I mentioned above. I don’t think there’s shame in ranting back at someone who’s ranting, and I don’t think that it’s hypocritical to do so. If you do, I can understand that, but I strongly disagree.

And I disagree with your claim that “Arguing about usage is one of the great and inescapable human activities, and an entirely necessary one because language is a social property in need of constant tending and re-negotiation.” The first clause is debatable, depending on what you mean by arguing usage. Arguing about what usages are more rhetorically effective, more poetic, and so on, is cool and worthwhile. I’m reluctant to say it’s inescapable, as I imagine most languages have never had such debates. Arguing about what usages are and are not acceptable, particularly the nitpicking in Fiske’s Dictionary, is neither great nor inescapable to me. The English language emerged with pretty clear rules about word order and all that jazz well before there was any substantial debate about the language. And while I don’t have any data on this myself, I imagine that meta-linguistic discussion is relatively rare in many non-European languages.

But I am completely against your second clause, that language needs tending. There is no need for this constant tending, at least not at a conscious level. Languages existed before there were self-appointed grammar snobs trying to dictate the direction of the language, as goofy noted above. Similarly, I do not accept your claim that “Deep down we are all grammar Nazis simply because we have to be, because there is no other way to keep the incredibly complex machine of language humming along as it does.” Again, complex language pre-dates language snobs. The language doesn’t need you and me and Fiske to keep humming.

I’m not pushing for the abolition of all rules when I say prescriptivism should die. What I’m saying is that most of the important rules of English are self-supporting. So when I say prescriptivism should die, I’m not saying that all language instruction should cease. I am asking for the destruction of the prescriptivist philosophy, the belief that niggling little points are so crucial. That’s what turns people off from grammar, from writing. I know, because it’s what turned me off from etiquette.

I know you’ll think I’m being facetious by saying this, but I’m not: I honestly do want (almost) all of this activity and conversation to cease. I wish I didn’t have a reason for this blog; I’d gladly give it up to focus on my actual linguistic studies if only the prescriptivists would do the same. Discussion of rhetoric is one thing, the discussion of why certain forms are better than others in certain ways and for certain purposes. Teaching people to write and speak better is crucial to the effective transfer of ideas, but the silly little rules that prescriptivists propose just detract from that goal. Learning to structure your thoughts well is far more important than learning whether sneaked or snuck is to be preferred.

And on your last point: “But the fact that speakers themselves are constantly making normative judgments, not just in conscious reflection upon language but in the most basic activity of forming and decoding untterances — this is part of the basic data the linguist should be acknowledging and studying, not denying and proscribing in what amounts to a renunciation of the empirical method.” I couldn’t agree with you more. But it is precisely the descriptive linguist who does this, and the prescriptivist who does not. I am a corpus linguist; I have, for instance, built logistic regression models to identify the factors that cause someone to prefer needs doing to needs to be done in a given situation, based on data from actual usage. What I renounce is relying on the proclamation of one language user (e.g., Fiske or me) over the observed usage of society. Fiske, in arguing against (for instance) only two, brazenly ignores the fact that millions of English language users just like us are making the normative judgment that only two is acceptable. Prescriptivists ignore all judgments that come outside of conscious reflection on language; they are the ones who renounce the normative judgments in more basic speech acts.

In closing, I am glad that Fiske is a friendly and open-minded soul in person, and I appreciate your defense of his character. I have never met him, and that’s why I included “strikes me as” in the title of the post rather than stating that he “is”: my opinion of him has been formed entirely from his books. I’d hate to know what people think of me if they only read these posts and never meet me in person. Then again, I’m not much better in person.

Hi guys. Thanks for the interesting and (in Gabe’s case, especially) careful replies. I can’t resist weighing in once more, but will try to do so less at length & with luck less huffingly.

* I think the prescriptivists against whom you are inveighing may be largely mythical constructs, the projection of your own (or anyone’s) natural resentment against having his own idiolect questioned. We are all deeply, emotionally, and pre-consciously attached to our versions of correctness, and we feel wounded and humiliated at a very deep level, and beyond apparently reasonable proportion, when someone questions our way of saying something. Really, think about it. How do you feel — does anyone feel — when someone tells you, “I think the correct pronunciation is ____” or “I think the word you want is _______”? How most people feel, I can tell you, is insulted and angry, because the apparent implication, just below the surface, though not consciously realized, is that one has been called an idiot or (possibly even more alarmingly) an outsider. However much the human brain tells us that such matters are trivial, the lizard brain knows somehow that they are really matters of life and death.

* I’m just winding up a 30+ year career as an English teacher, and one of my first projects in retirement (I keep telling myself), is to collect a bunch of essays into a collection to be called Don’t Shoot The English Teacher. Maybe the title itself will give you my drift: I want to talk about how the English teacher serves as sort of projection of the inner tension everyone (absolutely everyone) feels about usage, that strange mixture of guilt and anger that invariably makes people stiffen when they ask what I do and I am constrained to reply, “I teach English.” When I say that, people are sure they know me, because they all have long-standing and not very cordial relations with their own inner English Teachers, for whom I am now the surrogate . . . . But isn’t something of the same sort happening in your campaign against “prescriptivists”?

* In a broad but vital sense, we are all prescriptivists (just ask my 7 year-old grandson, correcting his five year-old sister as they jabber in the back seat of my car). In a more restrictive sense, perhaps only English teachers and grammarians are, but this still makes us a numerous tribe, no? And in another sense, anyone who has ever revised a draft or (for that matter) a spoken sentence, or asked “Is that how that is pronounced?” is admitting the immanence of rules and the need for them.

* Your point about the tendency of formal prescriptivists (like Fiske say, or Fowler, Brian Garner, George Orwell, or Samuel Johnson) to take a snarky tone while pronouncing sweeping, inchoate or simply false judgements is well taken I think. But well, there’s a reason even for such bad moments. What such writers are fundamentally doing is saying, “Hey, that sounds wrong” — then finding reasons to support their spontaneous emotional reactions, and often doing so much less well than linguists do. They are like critics in any other field — guided more by feeling and instinct than they perhaps let on.

* And at their better moments, formal prescriptivists are helpful, undogmatic guides to difficulties that they did not invent. That’s the key point, I think. Language is choice, constant choice, and the question of better and worse and right and wrong just never will go away, no matter how much we wish it would. Formal grammars may not have existed in English till the eighteenth century, but Rhetoric as a discipline (an often despised one! :-)) existed in Ancient Greece. Disputes over usage, and the desire and need to get them ironed out, are incessant and inevitable as language gets continually unsettled by usage and extralinguistic change. People even of the most tolerant nature feel a real and pressing need to get basic questions settled, whether it means correcting their own usage or the other fellow’s. English teachers (at our best, anyway) are not arbitrary snobs, but the inheritors and deputies of this general social sense that language needs tending and mediation.

* I agree that language is a majestic natural phenomenon, but it’s also a cultural one, and one that like everything else has undergone the Industrial Revolution and the rest of history. It may be true that language at the tribal level can stay healthy without any formal structure of rhetoric or grammar (though I suspect that even there the tribe would boast quite a number of zealous amateur grammarians). But no language is going to exist as English and other world languages currently do — serving a billion or more speakers, remaining relatively stable over long periods — without the massive cultural apparatus of schools, libraries, grammar books, dictionaries, style sheets, English Departments, etc. etc. that have made this possible. Most of these things are prescriptive in some broad sense, no? — just not peevishly and snarkily so.

* And even Nature takes constant human supervision and protection, no? So prescriptivism of some sort could be thought of as analogous to conservationism . . . .

* You attribute to prescriptivists the belief that “niggling little points are crucial” — but again, I would say that that belief is entirely spontaneous and shared even by those who think they oppose it: because, unfortunately, language itself consists of almost nothing else! The difference between a dog and a hog is one silly little phoneme, but if you want bacon, you better get it right. People who say SET FOOT IN are momentarily confused and thus annoyed by people who say STEP FOOT IN, and the problem cries out for resolution long before the grammarian gets to it. Ditto with SNEAKED vs. SNUCK — you say the problem is trivial, but just try not hearing it — and try not being at least momentarily vexed if you happen upon the nonstandard usage in, e.g., a scholarly article. Of course, tolerance is very often the counsel of wisdom, but strictness and system have competing claims, and the choice between them, case by case, all through the language, is and always has been a conscious enterprise.

* Moreover, since language is a structure of analogy and metaphor, any change, once accepted, rapidly propagates and leads to further, escalating changes — or WOULD, if the tendency to imitate were not balanced by a tendency to resist change while preserving fundamental conventions. Any small change is potentially a large change if accepted uncritically. Not that all change is bad, by any means; but runaway, heedless change probably is, unless you want your great-great-grandchildren to speak an idiom you could not understand . . . .

* Well, I have A) failed miserably at my attempt to be brief, and B) stopped making much sense; so I will stop here. Thanks for a stimulating and thought-provoking blog. I will be going back to look at some earlier pages when I have the chance, as I see that there is much to learn there . . .

John, I can’t speak for Gabe, but personally I have nothing against usage advice. What I don’t like is uninformed advice. A lot of Fiske’s advice is uninformed. As you say, he is trying to find reasons to support his spontaneous emotional reactions. But shouldn’t usage advice be better motivated than this? To determine if a usage is acceptable or not, it makes more sense to look at how well-regarded writers use the word, and to look at what other usage writers say about it, and the rationales they give. What Gabe is doing with this blog is giving well-motivated usage advice.

You write “People who say SET FOOT IN are momentarily confused and thus annoyed by people who say STEP FOOT IN, and the problem cries out for resolution long before the grammarian gets to it.” I don’t agree; language variation is normal, and I don’t think we have enough evidence to say that every bit of variation in every language is seen as a problem that needs to be resolved. Just because there are 2 ways to say something doesn’t automatically mean that one way is right and one wrong.

Thanks, John, this is indeed less huffy. “Snarky”, though, doesn’t do justice to the harshness of prescriptivist rhetoric in general — see for example the items collected under “word rage” at Language Log. I take Gabe’s violent subhead above to be mocking such excess.

Again, you affiliate prescriptivism like Fiske’s to the classical study of rhetoric, and I’m not sure why. In the terms of that tradition, these questions belong not to rhetoric but to grammar.

Finally, I’m not scared by the thought that my great-great-grandchildren might speak an idiom I wouldn’t easily understand. (“Could not understand” is hyperbole, of course, unless they move out of the Anglosphere.) Consider it in the other direction: my own great-great-grandfather (in the paternal line) was born in the US, but 162 years before me, and time has put a great distance between us in many ways. (He owned slaves, for one thing.) I’ve had practice in reading the English of his generation, but I’m sure he would find my own late-20thC idiom strange at best.

And even Nature takes constant human supervision and protection, no? So prescriptivism of some sort could be thought of as analogous to conservationism . . .

I would say the opposite — that conservation (even in demanding forms like the eradication of invasive species) is an effort to leave nature to its own devices. If this is “protection”, then it’s the left hand of humanity trying to protect nature from the heedless meddling of the right hand. And of course such conservation(ism) should be informed by the best science describing the way nature actually functions.

[…] There are local and institutional conventions, but since English lacks an official language academy, there is no universal Standard English. Pick a version and you will find it riddled, as Geoffrey Pullum wrote, “with disorder, illogic, inconsistency, oddity, irregularity, and chaos”. Amidst such ragged variability, clarity is desirable and elegance is admirable, but while certain rules facilitate these qualities, others are misguided myths that undermine them (e.g. “Don’t split infinitives”). Theodore M. Bernstein called such myths “Miss Thistlebottom’s hobgoblins”. Joseph M. Williams called them “classroom folklore” in his book Style: Towards Clarity and Grace. There is something almost tribal about them: if you don’t swear by certain linguistic commandments — that is, if you’re not part of the enlightened group — you don’t get to trash the transgressors. […]

*The thing that is said about split infinitives in most current writing texts is some form of “Avoid awkward split infinitives.” The problem with such advice, if there is a problem, is that it’s so gentle as to be almost devoid of content. (If you knew it was awkward, you wouldn’t have to know it was a split infinitive; you’d already be trying to fix it.) But as a RULE OF THUMB, the dictum is perfectly unexceptionable and modestly useful. SOME split infinitives are indeed quite awkward, enough so to justify the effort of revising a sentence. The concept of a split infinitive gives us one way of homing in on the problem when our innate linguistic sense is already telling us, “This sounds wrong.”

But things start to go awry when the rule is applied too rigidly and dogmatically, to the exclusion of competing imperatives, or when we all become so self-conscious of it that it is elevated into a shibboleth that one defies at peril of shame and ostracism. Then it can indeed become a destructive and pointless rule, but the same is true of most pointers one wants to give in a writing class. On every level, from spelling and phrasing on up to the composition of whole essays, the advice given tends to be, “Do it this way, mostly, unless you have a good reason not to.”

Another good example of the same situation, at the level of basic usage, is pronoun agreement. The handbook’s usual prescription– “Pronouns should agree in number and gender with their antecedents” — remains sound general advice. But absolutely no one follows (or should follow) it invariably and woodenly. The way of sanity, here, is not to decide (what no one can) that “singular they” either is or is not acceptable; but to realize that we have a broad rule or paradigm which admits of countless exceptions in practice.

I agree that prescriptivists are sometimes guilty of fetishizing and over-emphasizing their rules, of failing to admit the ubiquity of trade-offs and exceptions. But sometimes descriptivists are guilty of, at the least, a basic misunderstanding: they think that the iffy, messy, unscientific, but nevertheless useful advice of rhetoricians is a feckless attempt to do what the linguist is doing: articulate consistent algorithms of language, to arrive at scientific laws which can admit of no exceptions. I.e., they see prescriptivism as bad science, when at its best it is in fact a useful minor art.

* Goofy perceptively writes, “Just because there are 2 ways to say something doesn’t automatically mean that one way is right and one wrong.” I agree absolutely, but the problem here is that difference of form normally signals difference in meaning, and our downstairs language processors are primed and programmed to treat it so. So if you are using “when” and “whenever” interchangeably, as many of the locals around here do, the Standard speaker who hears an important difference gets repeatedly, albeit very mildly, tripped up as to your meaning. A case more in point is the unending controversy over “disinterested,” which conservatives want to reserve to mean “impartial, objective,” while at least 50% of American speakers cheerfully extend it to mean “uninterested.” What drives the traditionalist crazy is the sense of waste: two words now doing one job, while no word is doing the job that “disinterested” used to do so nicely. Ditto for “historic” and “historical,” a neat minor difference that many speakers hear (and want to hear) as the signal of an important difference of meaning (“momentous” vs. “factual,” roughly). It’s not a question of pointless snobbery or pedantry, or at least it doesn’t begin there; the reflex of resisting or even censuring non-significant variation is at bottom a question of practical function.

I don’t mean that traditionalists are always right about such issues, by any means; only that we must constantly assess the trade-offs, the advantages of variety and laissez-faire on the one hand, of consistency and clarity on the other.

James, disinterested/uninterested is a good example of what I mean by uninformed advice. The situation around these two words is much more complicated than simply “disinterested does not mean uninterested.” Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage devotes 2 pages to the subject. Here is a summary: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disinterested

MWDEU concludes that “the alleged confusion between disinterested and uninterested does not exist.” They also conclude that the “impartial” sense of “disinterested” has not been lost. “Disinterested” has 3 meanings: “free from selfish motive or bias”, “not interested”, and “having lost interest”. The “free from selfish motive or bias” meaning is still the most common. (In addition, the meanings of these 2 words were originally the opposite of what prescriptivists insist they should be today.)

It is just not true that we simply have 2 words doing 1 job while no word is doing the job that “disinterested” used to do. It’s also not a question of practical function; MWDEU shows that there is rarely any confusion when “disinterested” is used to mean “not interested”.

If prescriptivists want to argue that you should not use “disinterested” to mean “not interested” because some people will judge you for it, fair enough. But often they don’t say this. Instead they get the facts wrong: they say that the meanings of these 2 words have always been distinct until recently, or they say that only uneducated writers use “disinterested” to mean “not interested”.

Thanks for the MWDEU link — the site is indeed informative and interesting — but does not, alas, much change my mind about anything. I was disinterested (:-)) in taking a side in the particular debate over disinterested vs. uninterested, but only used that example (with several others) to show how, when faced with a particular small variation of form (dis- vs. un- in this case), speakers tend to look for and assume a difference of meaning. En route to their paradoxical conclusion that “the alleged confusion does not exist,” the MWDEU editors cite instance after instance of educated writers complaining that “disinterested seems to be losing its pristine sense” and so on because they have INDEPENDENTLY felt this when encountering the word used in its other sense — the one for which they would use “uninterested.” My point is only that there is no need to assume ill will on anyone’s part — no need to posit a malign conspiracy of grouchy grammarians, passing the myth along from one to another for no good reason, to account for the enduring nature of this controversy. The confusion does indeed exist — not a confusion over what any speaker means in a particular instance, which is nearly always clear, but about how the words ought to be used in general. THAT confusion is right there in the language, and it keeps being rediscovered spontaneously by speakers with no axe to grind or dog in the fight.

The MWDEU editors do an admirable job of sorting through the difficulty and giving good practical marching orders for the near future. This is what education should do, what dictionaries are for. But isn’t this prescription rather than description, or at least a mix of the two?

I don’t disagree much with what you’re saying, John. It’s true that when we notice that it’s possible to write either “compare to” or “compare with”, many of us suspect there must be a meaningful difference. The descriptivist point, though, is that this assumption needs testing, with evidence, and we should be prepared to find that there is no difference, that the forms are in free variation.

Also, when someone asserts such a distinction without a good evidence-based argument, I do think it’s reasonable to infer ill will. After all, this prescription will put some people in the wrong; and some prescriptivists do this with severe opprobrium and rhetorical violence.

I have a problem with John’s argument that language is full of problems that keep being rediscovered spontaneously, and that the desire to get them ironed out is inevitable and incessant. The tradition of English prescriptive grammar started in the 18th century; before that there were no usage books or English teachers (and some of our best literature was produced during that period). And most languages have no tradition of prescriptive grammar. If it is true that the desire to fix problems is inevitable and incessant, then why doesn’t it constantly happen in all languages, and why did English wait until the 18th century? And, why don’t we try to fix all the problems? Why do we focus on some and ignore others? We complain about “peruse” meaning “skim”, but no one minds “scan” used to mean “skim”, even though this is a recent change. We complain about sentence-modifying “hopefully”, but no one minds sentence-modifying “clearly”. We complain about “literally” used to describe something that is not literal, but we don’t mind when “really” is used to describe something that isn’t real.

I’m speculating, but I think usage writers are so inconsistent in their complaints because they’re simply writing in the English prescriptive tradition and following the examples of the writers before them.

Yes, MWDEU is prescriptive but as I’ve said I have nothing against rational prescriptive advice.

I’m with John all the way here. Strikes me simply seeing both sides of a coin. My contempt for what I find to be an especially patronizing usage lecture here and there doesn’t mean that I should decide all usage lectures that have ever existed are fundamentally flawed. Sheesh. Without prescriptivism we wouldn’t even be communicating. The idea that it never existed until recently is absurd. Language is learned because it is taught by more experienced users and always has been. Whether those teachers were always right or not is another thing, but so what? MIstakes get corrected (at least when they lead to confusion). Thank god not only are most people willing to take a stab at it when called upon, some of them will even make a career study of it.

In sort, some people do go overboard, nitpicking things that aren’t even problematic, just unfamiliar to them. It’s can be easy to notice. And some people take their religion of anti-conservatism to the point of sounding like anarchists and nihilists (usually only when they get worked up, though). That’s easy to notice too, when it’s similarly bull-headed.